Repressed Crises and Organizational Crisis Vulnerability: A Theoretical and Empirical Study
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https://doi.org/10.31039/plic.2026.16.379Keywords:
Organizational resilience, Organizational crisis, Organizational learning, Organizational memory, Organizational crisis experience, Dynamic capabilitiesAbstract
“We cannot become complacent,” a lesson learned from the Challenger disaster and cited by the Director of the NASA Safety Center (NASA Safety and Mission Assurance, 2021), highlights the importance of taking even minor issues and early warning signals seriously. While the literature suggests that organizations can learn from crises, the translation of crisis experiences into sustained learning, organizational processes, and resilience often actually remains an incomplete practice. This research conceptualizes resilience within a four-stage model that integrates early crisis exposure, organizational memory, organizational processes, and higher-order dynamic capabilities. The model builds on the assumption that resilience emerges through the interaction between these stages rather than as a static organizational attribute.
Based on this conceptualization, a coding framework was developed to enable a structured analysis of organizational crisis experiences across four analytical levels. The framework translates the theoretical model into a set of guiding questions that allow for systematic examination of how crises are perceived, processed, stored in organizational memory, and transformed into adaptive capabilities.
Overall, the framework is intended to be applicable across different types of organizations, as it provides a structured approach for analyzing how organizations learn from crises and develop resilience over time.
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